If you’re like me, one of the first things that attracted you to Scala was its parser combinators. Well, maybe that wasn’t the first thing for me, but it was pretty far up there. Parser combinators make it almost too easy to create a parser for a complex language without ever leaving the comfortable play-pen afforded by Scala. Incidentally, if you aren’t familiar with the fundamentals of text parsing, context-free grammars and/or parser generators, then you might want to do some reading before you continue with this article.

If you ever want to write a basic parser in Scala, take a look at this.